Scribbling alone in your notebook one night, you create the first draft of your Magnum Opus. The tangy smell of ink never left your body after you crafted a scroll to bring to your editor. Yet as she reads it, you learn that it is almost identical to a story written in Prague forty years ago. Cryptomnesia - a blog about literature and writing by author Joseph Patrick Pascale.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Note: I’m part of a small writing guild called Scrawl. This
is an excerpt from an issue of the Scrawl newsletter.

For various reasons, I’ve recently been thinking of
Emerson’s concept of Self-Reliance. Now, that’s not meant to go against the
spirit of collaboration that this guild is founded upon – after all, our group
perfectly matches Stephen King’s advice: “Write with the door closed, rewrite
with the door open” – and the comments on this last round of stories seemed to
be particularly insightful. However, Self-Reliance is meant in the spirit of
inner reflection and the contemplation of your core values, even those that
swim upstream of society and resist conformation with the world.

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true
for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- That is genius.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We’ve all read those advice lists about writing and
immediately thought of a counter-example. For instance, in Chuck Palahniuk’s
essay “Submerging the I,” he advises hiding the fact that the story is written
in first person until after the narrative has been established and the story
has some authority. He writes, “My personal demon is any story that starts with
‘I.’ That instantly turns off my attention. But that’s just me.” It is just
him, because when I read that, I instantly thought of the opening of
Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground: “I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful
man. I am an unattractive man.” That’s the example that comes to mind, but in
every one of those rules for writing articles, you’re going to find a few that
rub you the wrong way – Jonathan Franzen’s “It's doubtful that anyone with an
internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction” also looms at
hand, with writers like Teju Cole publishing compelling fiction via Twitter accounts just one illustration of how that can’t be true.

Yet we still read these lists because for every rule that
doesn’t get you, you’ll find one that seems to have been unlocked from deep
within your soul. You need to mix Emerson’s “Trust thyself: every heart
vibrates to that iron string” with Aristotle’s “It is the mark of an educated
mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Know thyself –
but be open to new ideas.

Joseph Patrick Pascale

How to Get a Promotion when your Boss Is Trying to Kill You, a comic literary novel by Joseph Patrick Pascale, will be published by Waldorf Publishing in 2018. Information will be available at: www.josephpatrickpascale.com